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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (18282)	7/16/2001 2:25:12 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Reagan may have been an old man, but he certainly wasn't boring. Remember "We start nuking the Soviet Union in 10 minutes." Now was THAT boring? His foreign policy adventurism did have its moments of cinematic thrill, but his vision for the nation and the economy was as dull as can be. The Reagan/Bush crowd never got out of their "back to the '50's" mentality; they couldn't get beyond the notion that we had somehow fallen from grace and needed to go back to where we once were. They were eventually tossed out by a generation that saw the chaos of the '60's and '70's not as a fall, but as a transition to something totally new, something potentially better than what we had before. Clinton certainly didn't create this idea, but he rode on its shoulders. The country simply needed someone with more youth, more vitality, more energy, someone who wanted to move forward instead of back. It didn't have to be Clinton, but he was the one that saw the wave and jumped on it successfully. So far I'd say we're simply getting a return to sanity. After the heady wine we drink in the last decade, it feels like depression, but it isn't. If the current crew can keep things within 10%-15% of here, it won't be all that bad. In terms of the markets, I would agree, there has been no crash, just a return to sanity. It has caused some damage on the confidence levels, though, as well as repercussions in foreign economies. All of this may require deft handling, much defter than any that was demanded of the Clinton administration. My biggest worry about the Bush team is the level of contempt in which they seem to hold the rest of the world. Maybe it is more evident to me, living abroad, but it is there, and I think it is very dangerous. For all Clinton's eccentricities, he was a confirmed multilateralist, and in a globalizing economy, we need more of that. We are not the lone cowboy any more, and never will be. I am not happy at having a President that seems to know less about the world than I do, and doesn't seem to care. Complacency? Interesting. There was much heat, hatred, and anger in that last election- -mostly going in the wrong directions. Complacency was certainly an issue during the primaries; by the time people woke up we were faced with Mickey Mouse vs. Bozo the Clown. And wasn't all the heat, hatred, and anger mostly flying among relatively small groups of partisan believers? I wonder how much of it the average American even noticed, to any greater extent than they would notice the sitcom of the moment? For all Clinton's faults, he was at least complex and to a degree interesting, and at least he rose on his own abilities and fell on his own faults. Bush and Gore are simply nonentities riding on the shoulders of their fathers: would either of them ever have attained any position of significance if they had not been born into a political family? I doubt it. We are falling back on old style dynastic leadership, and that seems to me to be a very bad sign.